"Restore the Fourth" isn't officially affiliated with any formal organizations, but given our shared goal of ending illegal spying on Americans, EFF had the opportunity to speak to the crowd. Below, you'll find a short video of some highlights from that speech, and the full text as prepared.

Hello everybody, and thank you for coming out here today to stand up for all of our Fourth Amendment rights. At EFF, we've been engaged in lawsuits about these secret and unconstitutional NSA programs for the better part of a decade, and we need the government to see that the American people are outraged.

Because nearly 250 years ago today, our founding fathers refused to live under tyranny and declared independence from their ruling government. The king, they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, had made it impossible to live under a rule of law.

A few years later they wrote the document that established the United States of America, our Constitution, and with it they published our Bill of Rights to protect the basic rights that every person in this country is entitled to.

The actions of the National Security Agency spying on Americans, revealed by a series of whistleblowers driven by conscience, represents a break from that tradition. And it's our duty not to allow that break. It's our duty as human beings, entitled to dignity and privacy, and it's our duty as Americans, protecting those rights not just for ourselves but for everybody who follows in our steps.

The Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment deliberately, with a specific purpose: to ensure that so-called "general warrants" were illegal. These general warrants were broad and unreasonable dragnets, requiring anyone targeted to forfeit their information to the government.

No, under the Fourth Amendment, a warrant needs to be specific. You need a particular target and probable cause.

Compare that with what we know the NSA is doing, and has been doing for years. Even now we can't know the full scope of what the government is doing when it claims to act in our names, but we know about these four programs:

The NSA obtains the telephone records of every single customer of phone companies like Verizon. They try to brush that under the rug by saying it's "just metadata," but the invasiveness of that metadata can be truly astonishing: every single call, who is on both ends, how long they spoke, and more.

The NSA in some cases obtains the actual content of phone calls, effectively listening in on private conversations.

The NSA taps the very basic infrastructure of our net, sucking up the raw data and storing it for who knows how long, doing who knows what kind of analysis to it.

The NSA obtains content from major tech companies, many of whom are based right here in this city, including videos, email messages and more, based on a 51% chance—a guess, basically—that the "target" of the investigation is a foreigner talking to somebody in the US.

Make no mistake: these programs are illegal. These are illegal under the Fourth Amendment, which we celebrate here today, and they are propped up only by outrageous and dishonest readings of laws that violate Congress' intentions.

And when the Director of National Intelligence was asked about these illegal programs on the floor of Congress, he flat-out lied about them, to Congress and to the American people. Once again, this government is acting in our name, but it refuses even basic accountability for its actions.

You don't lie to Congress to hide programs if you believe that they're legal. That's why we're demanding a few steps to once and for all shine some light on the activities of the NSA.

We want a full, independent, public Congressional investigation into what the NSA is doing, and what it claims it's allowed to do.

We want the public to see the secret legal decisions, made in a secret court, about what kind of surveillance the government's doing.

We want the public to see the Inspector General Reports about these programs.

We want to see how the government justifies these programs—that means any other reports about how necessary and effective they are.

And most importantly, we want public courts to determine the legality of these programs.

We think public courts will see through the NSA's torturing of the English language, and see that it's searching all of us, and seizing our data, in ways that are absolutely unreasonable.

Once the courts have reviewed these programs, we want the dragnet surveillance to stop. No more bulk collection of Americans' communication records, and no more open access to the backbone of the Internet.

In 1975, after widespread illegal activity by the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA, Senator Frank Church chaired a committee to examine that bad behavior and reign it in with new laws. It wasn't an easy road, but the Church Committee was able to establish some of the first real safeguards against these sorts of illegal activities. Frank Church was clear about why these were necessary:

If these agencies were to turn on the American people, Church said, "no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide."

Those are powerful words. But it's up to us to ensure that those words are a battle cry in the fight for our privacy, and not the epitaph on its grave.

The Fourth Amendment is there to protect us, but there comes a time when we have to step in and protect it. The NSA has treated the Fourth Amendment and the rest of the US Constitution like a suggestion they're free to ignore. Today, we stand up, and we let them know: that is unacceptable. We, the American people, will not let ourselves fall under tyranny, and we will not let government agencies establish the infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism.

We will push back, we will fight, and we will do whatever it takes to restore the Fourth Amendment and the rest of the U.S. Constitution. Thank you all for coming out today to send that message.

Related Updates

Last week, Facebook started sending a small portion of its users a new notification about its face surveillance program, which concludes with two important buttons: “keep off” and “turn on.” This is a step in the right direction: for these users, the default will be no face surveillance...

The California Senate listened to the many voices expressing concern about the use of face surveillance on cameras worn or carried by police officers, and has passed an important bill that will, for three years, prohibit police from turning a tool intended to foster police accountability into one that furthers...

EFF continues our fight to have the U.S. courts protect you from mass government surveillance. Today in our landmark Jewel v. NSA case, we filed our opening brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, asserting that the courts don’t have to turn a blind eye to the...

If you open Facebook’s mobile app today, it will likely suggest that you try the company’s new Dating service, which just launched in the U.S. after a rollout in 19 other countries last year. But with the company’s track record of mishandling user data, and its business model of monetizing...

Yesterday Facebook announced it was changing its settings for face recognition, which it has used since 2010 to match known faces in user profile pictures and other photos to unknown faces in newly uploaded photos. This leads to two questions: What exactly has Facebook changed? How many Facebook users...

Hundreds of thousands of Californians last year demanded that big technology companies respect their privacy rights, and supported a movement that led to the California Consumer Privacy Act. The law will go into effect on January 1, 2020. Big technology companies fought hard against the CCPA and have been leaning...

Media outlets reported this week that an international student at Harvard University was deported back to Lebanon after border agents in Boston searched his electronic devices and confronted him about his friends’ social media posts. These allegations raise serious concerns about whether the government is following its own policies regarding...

More than 400 police departments across the country have partnered with Ring, tech giant Amazon’s “smart” doorbell program, to create a troubling new video surveillance system. Ring films and records any interaction or movement happening at the user’s front door, and alerts users’ phones. These partnerships expand the web...

EFF is teaming up with the Mozilla Foundation to tell Venmo to clean up its privacy act. In a public letter sent to President/CEO Dan Schulman and COO Bill Ready today, we are telling Venmo to make transactions private by default and let users hide their friend lists. Both ...

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Mozilla have teamed up in an open letter to Venmo, telling the popular payment app to clean up its privacy settings, which leaves sensitive financial data exposed to the public. Venmo is marketed as a way for friends to send...